About

RickB- Human, Artist, Fool.

Ynys Mon, UK.

The blog is called ten percent because of what Kurt Vonnegut wrote when remembering Susan Sontag - She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.-

And I'm writing it because I need the therapy and I lust for world domination.

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It’s the last Friday on wordpress.com before the move on Monday to tenpercent.org.uk and just in the nick of time the decision as to the theme of the blog has been reached. It was not easy, there were some long nights, vinyl rummaging and acts of terror. It’s been a hard fought battle and the path here is littered with the very excellent choices that didn’t quite make it, maybe next year. The decision invigilated by an international committee of Nobel laureates and also people who aren’t war criminals, was made infinitely harder by the fact that the blog has two theme tunes…at least. First, it has made a Friday before but it endures, it abides, as I said then-

It forms some of the parameters of my soul.

Karl Hyde’s poetry is so evocative yet pleasingly playful with ambiguity yet you know just what he means, you identify with the experience that is both recounted in the track and is the track itself, the shards of memory, images, thoughts, feelings, flashing through the track resonate (pun!) with my own long memories of eternal summers on Welsh beaches and more contemporary sensations.

walking in the wind at the water’s edge
come closer covering my rubber feet
listening to the barbed wire, hanging

The rhythm and mantra like revelations within the lyric enriching your own understanding of even everyday speech and meaning, the need and frustration to communicate that is both aided and hindered by language.

The music’s a twisting turning epic under the genius of Rick (excellent name, obviously) Smith and grooves wrestled (at the time) by Darren Emerson. At times muscular, then quiet, loud, large having and transcendent, it’s a love song -sometimes- for people, places and feelings as its final movement in the original triptych suggests –Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love, it is music made of the mysterious matter that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are many versions, this is a live one from the Everything Everything release, each have their differences and all continually reveal new aspects, new collisions of rhythm, melody and language.

resonator resonator resonator resonator

Juanita/Kiteless

And, Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen, perhaps a controversial choice in light of his non boycotting by playing in Israel, but I can disagree with the decision yet admire the art and after all it is a tactic not an ideology, plus it’s a corking song. Perhaps a theme of ennui for the world weary cynicism of the thwarted romantic and idealist and also maybe holds a special place for those of a certain age when Pump Up The Volume came out. It gets covered quite often and the conceit of the lyric does lend itself to newer iterations as every age finds new lies, hypocrisies and crises that are lied about, which of course is all over now…

OK, now I’ve got it to those two I find that intolerable and want to add loads more, dammit!

So say goodbye to April, maybe the last month for years we do not live under a spite filled, hateful Tory administration attacking migrants, the poor & those on welfare on behalf of the ruling class & corporate state. Or as it is otherwise known another stretch of neoliberalism this time under Conservative management as opposed to conservative New Labour management. We are 31 years into the neoliberal remaking of our country into a corporatist authoritarian divided and unequal shit hole. Play it fucking LOUD!